Excluding a site from google search results

February 15, 2019 11:03 AM

Is there a permanent, global way to exclude a site from my google search results?

I'm looking for a way to do what appending "-site:example.com" does, without typing it every time.

I am logged into google.

posted by peeedro to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Best answer: God, I wish.

This used to be possible but Google deprecated the tool. It sucks.
posted by Glomar response at 11:12 AM on February 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

You could create a custom search engine in your browser, i.e. in Chrome, you can define search engines with keywords, so that the usual ctrl+k brings up your custom search with the -site:example.com, and in fact make it the default search engine.
posted by idb at 11:39 AM on February 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

google has a chrome extension called personal blocklist that claims to do this.
posted by zippy at 12:53 PM on February 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

+1 for Personal Blocklist
posted by QuakerMel at 1:07 PM on February 15, 2019

Hmm. Personal Blocklist stopped working for me and I gathered from comments that this was a widespread phenomenon. Perhaps it works again?
posted by Glomar response at 1:39 PM on February 15, 2019

Response by poster: Personal Blacklist does not seem to be working :(
posted by peeedro at 1:52 PM on February 15, 2019

If using Firefox you can also make a search keyword whose URL you'd then edit to exclude the site.
posted by trig at 2:18 PM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think this can be achieved with a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE):

1) Go to https://cse.google.com/cse/create/new
2) Under sites to search type www.google.com (just doing this to get the CSE created)
3) Name the search engine and click "Create"
4) Click on "Control Panel" (3rd button)
5) Turn "Search the Entire Web" to "On"
6) Select www.google.com under "Sites to Search" and "Delete"
7) Click "Advanced" under "Sites to Search"
8) Add your domains you don't want to see under "Sites to Exclude" and then "Update" at the very bottom.
9) Now you can bookmark the "Public URL" for the search engine and treat that as your search.

It's a little clunky, but it works and you only have to set this up once. You can also get fancy and add custom CSS and embed it in places.
posted by drawfrommemory at 6:20 PM on February 15, 2019 [7 favorites]

Seconding trig's suggestion above to use the search keyword functionality in Firefox. I used that to create a "wp topicname" shortcut for getting straight to the Wikipedia article on a topic. You could create a "g" keyword to do the google search but subtract out the offending site automatically. Then you'd only need to type two more characters ("g ") to get your sanitized search.

Of course, this would only work on that browser on that computer.
posted by intermod at 8:54 PM on February 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure if this is quite what you want, but I love Google Hit Hider. There's some documentation at the author's site.
posted by kristi at 12:06 PM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

This works! Thanks, kristi! This is a tool that supports good mental hygiene.
posted by Glomar response at 5:54 AM on March 21, 2019